This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 10-2004-0075130, filed on Sep. 20, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a heatsink used in a computer, and more particularly, to a heatsink including a plurality of thin heat-dissipating plates each of which has a long heat-dissipating region and a short heat-dissipating region to effectively cool electronic components mounted on a narrow electric circuit board.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heatsinks cool components that produce heat. Specifically, heatsinks absorb heat of electronic components, such as elements that generate heat during operation, and outwardly dissipate the absorbed heat to prevent overheating of the electronic components.
Electronic components, such as central processing units (CPUs), video graphics array (VGA) cards, and power transistors, produce a large amount of heat during operation. If an electronic component is heated over a predetermined temperature, errors may occur in the electronic component, or the electronic component may be damaged. For this reason, heatsinks are installed on such heating components to dissipate heat generated by the components into the air, thereby lowering the temperature of the electronic components.
With the rapid development of science and technology, a variety of electronic components or devices have been highly integrated and miniaturized in recent years. Accordingly, the amount of heat per unit area is also increased. If the size of heat sinks increases, the heat dissipating efficiency increases. However, heatsinks should keep up with the trend of miniaturization of the electronic components. Heatsinks are now manufactured to have various shapes to follow this trend and increase heat dissipation rate per unit area.
When seen from a position directly above heatsinks, the heatsinks have various shapes, for example, circular, oval, and square shapes. However, these various shapes of heatsinks share a common feature: they are symmetric as a whole. Both sides or four sides are symmetric with respect to the central line or center of the heatsinks.
If a heatsink is symmetrical and a circuit board on which a heat source is mounted is large, the size of the heatsink is determined only by considering the amount of heat of the heat source. However, if the circuit board is narrow and the heat source mounted on the circuit board is located not in the center of the circuit board but on an edge of the circuit board, it is difficult to use a symmetrical heatsink for effective heat dissipation. That is, if a large heatsink is mounted near an edge of a circuit board, part of the heatsink may extend out beyond the circuit board. In this case, it is highly possible that the heatsink will interfere with other electronic components mounted inside a computer.